Bubble plot

This plot shows the history of topics on Meetup from 2010 to 2017. With number of members on the x axis, number of events per topic on the y axis and the radius showing the number of groups per topic. The most popular and fast-growing topic is Social Networking, with the most members, groups and top number of events. New technology has grown to be a huge topic too, with over 140k members registered, yet not many events until 2017. Performing Arts, in third place regarding the size, has initiated most events since 2010, which makes it the most active topic.

Stacked Area Chart

This stacked area chart shows the time series of number of events broken down by 3 different cities scheduled from 2017.11 to 2018.10. We can see that the overall trend is first decreasing, then oscillating with small amplification, and finally plummeting in the last month. This could be caused by the fact that the scheduled events in later dates did not start populating by the time the data was collected. Also, the volume of data from Chicago is about twice as much as San Francisco or New York.

Chicago

Meetups in Chicago mainly happen within The Loop. Socializing, again, is the most popular topic in terms of both number of events and number of participants. Photography plays an important part in the meetup culture of Chicago too.

New York

New York has the most diversified topic distribution out of the 3 cities. The events are mostly aggregated in Manhattan. Socializing still is a major topic but not as dominating as San Francisco. Other topics like Education & Learning, Games, Art & Culture also draw in big populations of event-goers. Different topics also have different patterns. Events of Education & Learning are more aggregated in the middle of the island, while Games and Arts & Culture are more spread geographically and also have more occurrences.

San Francisco

Judging from both the size and color spread, socializing is the most dominating topic in San Francisco. Tech is another popular topic that attracts a fair amount of participants. The meetups are mostly distributed on the northeast side of SF as expected.

Social network

This is a social network plot indicating the relationship between two topics: the closer the nodes are, the more people that are interested in both groups, the color of the node indicates how many connections that topic has to other topics. As we can see, the most popular topic is Eating Drinking & Talking, followed by Social, Language, New Technology and Sports. They are in the middle of the network, highly correlated with other topics. Topics like Art, Wine and Wellness are less popular and correlated to others.